Well, not quite a “detour” in the strict sense of the word I suppose, since travel in the Balkans was in the “Europe” plan – it was, in fact, always to be the other half of the first leg of our Europe trip  ( after Scandinavia ).

Here I will back up just a bit, so the whole route might make some sense to the casual reader of our blog. Just as we had not travelled extensively in the north of Scandinavia during our first European experience in the 1980s, nor had we the opportunity to travel in any significant way in the former Eastern bloc. So this time we wanted to get out and explore the Balkan states that we had missed before, with a specific focus on Romania and more or less by way of transit, which ever other states we might pass through in getting down to Romania and back. Knowing we would return later in the summer, headed to Turkey and focus on the Adriatic coast, on this final month for now we’d travel to Romania ( primarily ), but then loop back to Northern Europe via Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia ( Serbia we needed to rule out once the decision was made to enter Kosovo directly ). So, that was the plan – now we had to get to Romania and back with about 5 weeks of “Schengen” time left in Europe “phase 1”.

We applied two criteria to determine our itinerary; firstly, which route was more or less the most direct, and secondly, (where possible ) which route took us through places we had never been before. The first part of this was easy – south through Germany, crossing into Poland, then hopping over the Tatra Mountains across Slovakia, touching Hungary in the east before reaching Romania in the north-west of the country. This did involve a couple of days solid driving and with the stops we made en route- came to almost a week. Here is the week that was !

Crossing from Denmark, Kiel and Lubeck in Germany’s north were new to us so along with Berlin ( not new, but where the weather was simply too awesome not to make a stopover ) we spent time in both places. Kiel’s big attraction ( to me ) was the chance to go inside a real WW2 German U-boat ( submarine U-995 ), and while less appealing to Lois, it absolutely made my day. Hard to imagine those guys living for weeks and months on end in those things – and getting depth charged regularly ! A fascinating experience to actually get inside one. It was a very dangerous job – of 41,000 German submariners, 30,000 died and 5,000 were captured, a fatality rate of close to 75%.

Lubeck is one of Germany’s gems and lived up to every superlative we’d heard about it. So much history, so many stunning buildings and all so well preserved or restored. Being able to camp across the river from the old town was just icing on the cake – so convenient.  While in Lubeck the vehicle had to go in for a major scheduled service which, while draining our budget somewhat, did give us more time in this beautiful little city. Magical place.

Berlin fell right on the route to Bucharest – a city one could easily visit over and over, so we did not mind a repeat and the sunny weather just added to the experience. The Tiergarten, the Brandenburg Gate – and this time, no wall ! Getting here in 2025 was much simpler than doing so in 1986 back when “West” Berlin was an oasis of capitalism in the sea of communism that was “East” Germany.

A long haul then took us through generally nice scenery, with good weather making driving easy and we made full use of Germany’s excellent Autobahn’s and Poland’s modern highways.  Crossing the Tatra’s to Slovakia was especially picturesque given the weather was vastly improved since the last time we were in these parts. While we crossed Hungary in the far east, it was very brief, and the only reason we went that way was to avoid the need to transit western Ukraine ( Google Maps actually had planned a route out that would have taken us there – Lois said no 😟). Our return would bring us to much more interesting  parts of Hungary.

So, with that all done we were at the Romanian border- the crossing was easy ( Romania is “in” Schengen now ) and we look forward to exploring all its charms in the days ahead.

Till next week !